Thread by @guektiengieline

It's great that the rest of the world is finally catching up, but it would be nice if the mainstream would acknowledge that Indigenous people have talked about climate change for decades.

Especially indigenous communities in circumpolar areas have warned of the devastating effects of global warming for over 40 years. As Larisa Pavlovna Adjedeva, the director of the Saami Cultural Centre in Lovozero said to the Snowchange Cooperative in 2009;

"When we ask the Elders and reindeer herders for example what kind of summer it will be, how much berries to expect or what kind of fish and how much to expect they answer us that they cannot predict anything because our Saami calendar of yearly cycle has collapsed completely ...

because of the changes that have taken place in the nature. They cannot foresee accurately and with precision. Before we would ask the reindeer herders and the answers would be right to the mark but now the predicted times keep on moving and changing."

At the same time, however, the fact that the ones who have done the least to cause climate change in the first place, and who are hit the hardest by it are now *also* being harmed by misguided attempts to stop it, is more often than not completely ignored.

The idea pervading Western society at the moment is that nature has to be saved, but what Western society seems to forget at the same time is that it could listen to and learn from communities that have lived sustainably for millennia.

Many people in the West seem oblivious to the fact that two of the most common measures taken to halt climate change, the production of biofuels and the building of hydroelectric dams, are directly hurting indigenous peoples around the world.

While using biofuels, often produced from sugar canes, does diminish the emission of greenhouse gases, it also contributes directly to the destruction of indigenous peoples’ ancestral homelands. As Amilton Lopez stated in 2008;

"The big sugar cane plantations are now occupying our land. Sugar cane is polluting our rivers and killing our fish. [It is increasing] suicides, mainly among young people, alcoholism and murder."

While the measures taken serve to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a certain extent, the growing of plants to create biofuels harms nature and completely ignores the right to land and life held by the indigenous peoples living in the areas where biofuel is grown.

The Guaraní was one of the first tribes to make contact with Europeans, but now, thanks to biofuel plantations, the majority of them are driven from their ancestral homelands and forced to live in make-shift camps next to plantation roads, where people starve to death.

Another big threat to indigenous peoples and indeed nature is the building of hydroelectric dams.

In an attempt to reduce our carbon footprint and bring down our dependency on non-renewable energy sources, the building of hydroelectric dams, which use ‘the never-ending source of water and rivers’, are hailed as a massive step forward in the fight to stop climate change.

What is completely ignored, however, is the massive impact dams have on indigenous peoples around the world.

To this day, the building of hydroelectric dams have forcibly displaced between 40-80 million indigenous peoples and minorities from their ancestral homelands, leaving these people, to quote International Rivers, ‘economically, culturally and psychologically devastated’.

From the Ethiopian Gibe III dam to the building of the Murum and Bakun in Indonesia and Malaysia, hydroelectric dams destroy indigenous peoples lives, while being hailed as great investments for ‘nature’.

Any attempt to halt climate change has to involve indigenous peoples; without drawing on and using the centuries of knowledge held by indigenous peoples with regards to the areas they inhabit, we cannot ‘save the planet’.

Western activism tries to turn itself into false custodians of nature, while completely ignoring the fact that indigenous people, by virtue of relying on their ancestral homelands for their survival, already make great custodians of the same.

Western climate activism also has a troubling tendency of turning the ‘saving of the planet’ into a capitalist project.

One obvious example of this was the creation of the UN REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) schemes.

Rather than listening to the valid concerns raised by indigenous communities inhabiting forests faced by deforestation, these schemes turn indigenous ancestral homelands into cash cows for the world’s states, if they can prove that their forests are free from human presence.

In other words, in order to get UN funding to protect forests already in the custody of indigenous communities, many states forcibly evict indigenous communities from their homes, thereby using a ‘green rhetoric’ to justify the violation of indigenous peoples’ human rights.

Before the 2009 Copenhagen meeting, the International Forum of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change stated that:

2REDD will increase the violation of our human rights, our rights to our lands, territories and resources, steal our land, cause forced evictions ...

prevent access and threaten indigenous agriculture practices, destroy biodiversity and culture diversity and cause social conflicts."

In 2013, Tom Goldtooth pointed out that 10 of the 16 countries who had received REDD+ funding had violated FPIC.

It is important to battle climate change, but we cannot allow ourselves to let this battle turn into a wave of green colonialism.

It is important to speak up against climate change, making it the focal point of all our political discussions, but it is equally important to make sure that the people most hurt by climate change get to be heard and seen in these discussions.